Unified by its theme of metamorphosis, these poems descend deeply into subjects as divergent as a jetty that disappears during high tide, to a talking parasitical head, to a sandlot baseball legend, to a famine road in Ireland, to Orpheus, to Wittgenstein, to a murdered poet and his wife, and finally to grave personal loss, tracing through all of its many attentions the thread that binds the physical to the metaphysical—a psychic passage from death back to life again.

Reviews / Endorsements

“These are very beautiful poems, and The Net is a very beautiful book—surpassingly so. Some poems are movingly personal, yet are always also about the experience we share as human beings; how we recognize ourselves in how we look at things, in what we read and have read, and in the evidence of our dismaying human lives. In that very way Tobin's marvelous translation of Trakl's ‘All Souls’ memorializes human experience. Tobin also displays an extraordinary capacity for using his resources as a poet through his command of diction and idiom, and through his versification—his ability to produce fluent and expressive metrical lines in sequences (often rhyming in very original, surprising ways) which construct, for each poem, an identifying and powerfully persuasive music, and in his ability to convey also in free-verse the music of impressive thought and feeling. The mastery evident in his uses of these resources is enviable.”—David Ferry

DANIEL TOBIN is the author of five previous poetry collections. Awards include the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the NEA and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.